Zetta Blog

State of Disaster Recovery Survey Results: Downtime, DR Considerations and More

by Maggie Getova

Dec 2, 2016

Our annual State of Disaster Recovery survey results for 2016 are in! We asked 395 IT pros about their experience with downtime, what they find most important in a disaster recovery solution, and much more.

First, we wanted to find out what the biggest cause of downtime was. According to IT pros, 75% say that power outage is their number one cause of downtime. After that, 52% stated hardware error, 35% stated human error, 34% referenced virus/malware attack, 20% said natural disaster, and 11% stated onsite disaster. Power outages have been the number one cause of downtime for years, so there was no surprise there. It’s important to note that virus and malware attacks are on the rise, however, as IT pros encounter them more frequently in their environments.

Our results also showed us how quickly the cost of downtime can rise. According to our findings, 54% of companies have experienced a downtime event which lasted over 8 hours (in the past five years). In addition, 67% of businesses estimate they would lose over $20k for every day of experiencing downtime. Considering just a few of these factors, downtime can get expensive fast.

When asked what the most important aspect of a disaster recovery a solution, IT pros ranked reliability at number one, speed of recovery at 2 and cost at 3. When we asked IT pros the same question last year, they ranked cost at number one. It’s possible that the serious consequences of downtime are starting to have an impact in how IT pros view disaster recovery.